View full size Craig Risien, Oregon State UniversityThe InShore Mooring Test 2 on the deck of the RV Wecoma with the Yaquina Bay Bridge in the background.

NEWPORT – News these days from the Oregon State University seems to have taken its cue from Jules Verne. There's talk of underwater gliders, ocean observatory platforms and coastal profilers. This, however, is no sci-fi plotline, but the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the largest ocean science project ever funded by the U.S. government – and a big chunk of it is happening right here off our coast.

Scientists from the country's leading oceanography institutions are at work on a five-year construction project that, when finished, will give instant access to anyone able to click a mouse to information from the surface waters to the very depths of the sea.

"It's a huge deal," said Bob Collier, OSU's program manager. "It's not going to replace the old way of going out to sea and making measurements, but it is going to add to them so we can better understand the ocean. It's not only happening here. There are installations going on around the U.S. and around the globe. We've gotten to the point across the nation where we need to have eyes on the ocean 24/7 in order to answer some of the most important questions."

The project dubbed "Endurance Array," features a fleet of undersea gliders and six sites with multiple observation platforms. The first three of the platforms will be deployed off Newport in 2013 and a second set of three off Grays Harbor in 2014.

The $386 million project grew out of nearly two decades of planning by scientists from all over the world, said Tim Cowles, Vice President and Director of Ocean Observing at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, partly from federal stimulus money, and includes 540 miles of undersea fiber optic cable installed by the University of Washington off the Oregon Coast. A second project, "Pioneer Array," is underway off the coast of Massachusetts. OSU and the University of Washington are part of a team that also includes Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of California, San Diego and Rutgers University.

"What the Ocean Observatory Initiative is all about is to provide crucial information about ocean conditions and ocean properties and deliver those in a continuous sustained way for 20 to 30 years," said Cowles.

The undersea gliders will patrol the ocean from the Canadian border to southern Oregon.

"They are about seven feet long, and they go up and down between the surface and down to about 600 feet; the others further offshore go down to almost 3,000 feet," Collier. "As they go up and down, their wings cause them to move forward. They don't move very fast, they move about a foot, even less, per second. They work their way through the ocean, telling us about the conditions, constantly taking a picture of the ocean."

The observatory platforms are about 10 feet wide with 10-foot tall towers, he said. The Newport sites will be located at one mile, 10 miles and 33 miles offshore. The near shore site will have a buoy to measure conditions in the ocean, while offshore sites will have a surface buoy to monitor air and sea surface temperatures, solar radiation, humidity, air pressure and other variables. The sites will also have seafloor platforms with numerous instruments and "profilers" that will continuously move and down from the surface to seafloor, sending even more data.

"In more than a half century of work, OSU scientists have recorded about 4,000 profiles of the near-shore from ships," said Jack Barth, OSU project scientist. "During the past five years, the handful of gliders we already utilize have logged more than 156,000 profiles – nearly 40 times what six decades of shipboard studies have provided. When OOI goes on line it will be happening in a year."

Scientists believe the data may lead to new understanding about everything from global warming to tsunami readiness.

"The revolution here is we are going to have a constant presence beneath the surface so it's that new view into the ocean," said Barth. "Because of that we are going to catch the events that we don't usually see. We're going to catch the ocean storms, the harmful algae blooms, we're going to understand the air/sea interaction."

And they expect the data will be used not only by scientists, but by fishermen, farmers, classrooms and the just plain curious. Fishermen might pull up the information to help them decide if it's a good day to go out, while farmers might access it to make decisions about what to plant in future seasons. Young scientists could use it as a tool to accomplish more research, Collier said.

"The OOI will help us understand the ocean off shore and it will give us data for longer than you and I can envision. People will start to learn more, and coupled with agencies like NOAA that focus on large scale ocean changes, we'll be able to see how the ocean in the Pacific Northwest effects our local climate.

"This will allow people to get up in the morning and look at a webcam and see what is going on in the ocean. That is not necessarily profound but it really allows people to connect personally and think about it and ask their own questions. Some days it may be boring and some days really exciting. It just expands their universe."

-- Lori Tobias

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